Weekend Musings: Exercise

It’s now been about seven, eight weeks, but I’ve started exercising more again. Beyond walking anyway. It started with Me-TV, of all things, and Facebook. They posted an advertisement for Jack La Lanne’s show that they would be airing online.

I had vague memories of the show, so I tuned in. And I’m watching this show and going, “I could do this,” and I started doing it and it was kind of fun. I could also see a change right away.

I’ve always had a bad history with physical exercise. I have flat feet, which are hereditary in my family. In my case, my feet roll in when I walk, and then drop all the way to ground. It makes for bad running, or anything else involving the feet.

In 7th grade they had the bean run. We’d run around the exercise field and when we passed the teacher, she’d give us an uncooked pinto bean. The more times we ran around in the allotted time, the more beans we got, and then afterwards everyone would count them up.

I was always the last one in and the one with the fewest beans.

That trend continued in the Army, which absolutely loved running. The formation would take off fast, and I would try to keep up. But the faster I ran, the more clumsy I felt, like I was going to careen out of control and slam into the people around me.

The Army was also good at humiliating people for not keeping up. A lot of times, they treated us as if we were lazy or needed extra training. Extra training consisted of doing it more.

But it sometimes veered into cruel.

Some of the guys would make nasty remarks. One sergeant kept making such juvenile remarks to me that I ended up going to my squad leader to get him to stop.

And I also kept hurting myself trying to keep up, so I was really glad to stop when I got out of the Army.

But I’ve also felt the lack of exercise.

I’d tried the gym off and on over the years. But the weights got boring quickly, and time was always a factor. Who wants to get off work, then spend an hour driving back and forth to the gym? I’ve always liked the idea of the classes, but they tend to be very aggressive.

So trying Jack La Lanne’s exercises was a perfect fit for me because that focus is on using the muscle, and I don’t have to do any driving. Unfortunately, Me TV stopped posting the videos about four weeks ago. Given the abrupt nature, I think a legal issue cropped up. I started repeating the videos, but I got one of the books (thanks Amazon!).

My overall goal is to lose weight to help my feet, but right now the goal is just simply to do it and have fun doing it.